Due to several factors such as irregular meals, artificial air-conditioning/heating, various stresses from social life, environmental pollution, =frequent washing for make-up removal, and natural skin aging, modern people are easily exposed to skin injuries such as deficiency of essential minerals and amino acids for maintaining homeostasis of body, skin drying, and keratogenesis. Therefore, efforts to maintain the homeostasis of body and protect and improve the skin are requested.
As half bath, aroma bath and the like have been recently known, attention to bath therapies which are helpful to the health is increased. Such bath therapies are known to provide noticeable effects from make-up effect to the prevention and treatment of diseases without special side-effect.
Particularly, bath therapies using bath additives having various medicinal ingredients are drawing a great interest because of their effects. The bath additives refer to substances placed and used in a bath for the purpose of prevention of diseases and alleviation of symptoms, protection and washing of skins, and recovery of fatigues. As bath additives, a bath crystal, a bath salt, a vegetable preparation, a milk bath, a paste preparation, a jelly preparation, bath oil, bath calcium, a bubble bath and the like are usually used depending on preparations, ingredients and effects.
The bath additives comprise mostly mineral and vegetable materials. Recently, development of the bath additives to provide oriental medicinal therapeutic effects using such herbs has been actively made. The bath additives using such herbs seem to derive from a traditional therapy of boiling medicinal herb materials and then exposing the resulting steam to a subject or dipping a whole body with the drug water. The bath additives using such herbs can be applied by various methods, for example, in washing a lesion or in dipping a whole body to a bath water containing the bath additives. Generally, the bathing is made as follows: The bath is filled with hot water; 50 to 100 g of herbal bath materials are placed and tied in cotton or cloth wrapper, and then brewed in a bath water. Subsequently, while herb water is properly brewed, a user takes a quick shower. The user enters the bath water when the temperature of the bath water is lowered to 36° C. to 38° C., dips the body for 15 to 20 minutes, and then comes out the bath, puts soap on the body, and rinses the body by raising a hydrostatic pressure.
However, when bathing is made using such herbs, a user has to purchase the herbs directly, brew them in hot water of the bath and then has a bath with the herbal bath water. As such, the bathing is very cumbersome and inconvenient. There is a limit to universalize it in an ordinary household. Conventional bath additives aim at providing effects of make-up or soothing a skin and alleviating dermatitis. Therefore, there is a need to develop functional bath additives having various therapeutic effects.